Lecture 3: What Does It Mean? Interpretation, Correlation, Application, and Prayer All Through

The lecture, section by section

1. Two columns: what it says, what it means

   Observation gathers what a text says, interpretation asks what it means, and the danger is leaping across the gap. From observation alone, be filled with the Spirit does not yet tell you what filling is or even which spirit is meant; those answers must wait until enough observations are in hand to settle the key questions with evidence.

2. New discoveries are usually stop signs

   The interpreter with a preconceived idea manages the passage so it comes out right. Rosscup adds a sobering check: after centuries of diligent, Spirit-led scholarship, it is statistically unlikely that you will discover a new truth on any major doctrine, so when the commentaries uniformly disagree with your novelty, treat it as a glaring red light. God is in the business of revelation; we are in the realm of discovery of what he has already revealed.

3. The stone that changed everything

   A man in a sleek new car sees a boy waving by the road, drives past, and takes a stone in his door panel. He storms back in fury, until the boy points to his little brother in the bushes, dying and needing a hospital. In an instant the driver's whole interpretation of the event changes. So it must be with Scripture: new facts must be allowed to overturn an interpretation set in concrete.

4. Sincerely wrong: pressed in the spirit

   A caller once told Rosscup he had discovered in the King James of Acts 18:5 that Paul, pressed in the spirit while tentmaking, was straining in the flesh because he held a secular job, which conveniently justified the caller's own refusal to work. The word actually means constrained, focused with urgency on the work of the gospel, and casts no shadow on ordinary employment. The man was sincere, and sincerely wrong, twisting the word without knowing it.

5. The exercise: a rough trip and pounds of books

   A 1965 letter from a seminary friend reports a rough trip: he got rid of about sixty more pounds of books, then two hundred more, bought a battery, a universal joint, and shock absorbers, and reckoned the whole thing cost eighty to a hundred dollars. Six interpretations are on the table, from selling the books to throwing them out the window. The class hunts for the observations that actually decide the question.

6. Key words against less decisive ones

   The word more shows books were going before any car trouble appeared. The chain of time words, first, then, after, by the time I was through, must be gathered into one composite observation rather than left in pieces. The word rid tempts one student toward selling, but the decisive word is pounds: no used book dealer weighs books, while the post office does. And nothing in the letter is a purpose clause; he never says he got rid of books in order to pay for parts.

7. Historical background settles it

   Rosscup knew the writer: a man who had spent seminary lovingly building a library he prized for his coming ministry. That background rules out selling or dumping his treasures. The answer, confirmed by the friend's own follow-up letter, is that he mailed the books home to lighten the load, keeping every one. Some student suggestions, a second trip, a deliberate shopping spree, a missing wife, illustrate observations invented rather than observed.

8. Words live inside cultures

   An English visitor hears a California farmer say of his fruit, we eat what we can and what we can't we can, and retells it at home as what we can't, we tin. A pound in England is money; in America, weight. Culture assigns meanings to words, on the mission field and in the ancient world alike, and the interpreter must get acclimated before he pronounces.

9. Correlation: the child passages of Isaiah

   Correlation relates the facets of truth into one system. Before leaping from Isaiah 7:14 to Matthew 1, the interpreter must correlate the virgin's son with the other births in Isaiah: the sign child of 8:3 whose name means hastening to the spoil, the son of 9:6 called Mighty God, the shoot from Jesse's line in chapter 11, the root out of dry ground in chapter 53 that Acts 8 opens to the Ethiopian. Liberal interpreters collapse 7:14 into 8:3 and call Matthew mistaken; the answer is not louder assertion but wider, more careful correlation.

10. A principle is advice; an application is action

    Application asks how the meaning goes into shoe leather, for the best translation of the Bible is its translation into daily life. A principle is advice, an ideal, scholarly learning about the text; an application is action, implementation. Take vitamins daily is a principle until the vitamins are taken. Rosscup corrects his own syllabus on the spot: both the principle and the application must arise out of a solid and sound set of observations.

11. Keep application out of interpretation

    A current fad, documented in the assigned reading, meshes the interpreter's own situation into the interpretation itself, fuzzing the line between what the text meant and what it demands. Respected scholars follow one another into it, meaning well and misleading. The order is fixed: interpretation first, then application flowing from it, or else someone announces the Lord led me on the strength of a terrible reading, as if a God of integrity had guided the misuse of his own word.

12. Appropriation: grace for the doing

    Beyond applying the truth stands appropriating the grace to live it, by faith, as James 1 requires asking in faith. Paul opens Philippians praying and closes it praying grace upon the readers. The application is not to be carried out in earthly strength; God's presence, power, and promises are to be taken hold of so the truth is lived the way he intends.

13. Organizing for persons, prayer through everything

    A sign by a city mayor's secretary's telephone read: remember, you are talking to a person. So with teaching: material is organized for people, around a main point, not scattered like a porcupine preacher whose many points leave no point. Prayer belongs at the start of study, in the middle, even on yellow tabs as reminders, and after preaching, as Spurgeon would shut his study door and check in with his Lord. And results belong to God: a night in Fullerton on 1 John 1 seemed fruitless until a stranger at a hotel counter months later said, that was the night my life changed.

1. The driver's fury dissolved the moment he saw the whole picture. Where have you held an interpretation of a verse, or of a person, that new facts should have been allowed to change sooner?

2. A principle is advice; an application is action. Take one truth from Sunday's sermon and name the difference for yourself: what would the shoe leather version actually look like this week?

3. Rosscup left Fullerton certain he had failed, and learned months later a life had changed that night. How does that reshape the way you judge fruitfulness, in ministry or in a conversation about Christ?